Making Too Much of Romney’s ’Mad Men’ Moment

By Stephen L. Carter -
Apr 12, 2012

There is an old story, possibly
apocryphal, about the brilliant Russian-Danish chess master Aron
Nimzovich.

Upset when his opponent lit a cigar in the middle of their
game, Nimzovich complained to the tournament director. The
director interceded, and the other player put out the cigar. A
little while later, Nimzovich sought assistance again.

“Your opponent isn’t smoking,” said the director.

“I know, but he looks as if he wants to,” he replied.

This tale comes to mind when I consider the way that many
conservatives worked themselves into a lather after a character
on the popular television show “Mad Men” remarked, “Romney’s a
clown” -- a reference to George Romney, a businessman and
politician in the 1960s and the father of presumptive Republican
nominee Mitt Romney. Many observers took the comment as a swipe
at the son, and so one more example of Hollywood’s liberal bias.

But it really is possible to be too vigilant: In context,
as the show’s legions of defenders were swift to point out, the
comment made perfect sense. And “Mad Men” is really the last
program that can fairly be described as a bastion of liberal
propaganda. If anything, even taking account of its historical
setting, the show’s politics seem to run in the other direction.

True, David Axelrod, President Barack Obama’s chief
political strategist, has used the show to bash Mitt Romney. “I
think he must watch ‘Mad Men’ and think it’s the evening news,”
Axelrod said. “He is just in a time warp.” Once again,
conservatives predictably jumped on the remark.

The Wrong Target

But that was Axelrod speaking, not the show. The critics
are behaving like Nimzovich, attacking not “Mad Men” so much as
what they take to be its aspirations. And here I think they are
wrong.

Now, I will admit that I am a big fan of “Mad Men,” and I
am not a fan of much on television (other than sports). But one
needn’t have the slightest interest in the program to see why
its critics have things exactly backward.

“Mad Men” -- in case you have somehow missed the media
frenzy over the program -- is an ensemble show set in the 1960s,
at a Madison Avenue advertising agency. Over the years, despite
series creator Matthew Weiner’s unabashed liberal politics, the
show has mocked at least as many liberal as conservative icons.
Thus in an earlier episode built around the 1960 campaign,
protagonist Don Draper dismisses John Kennedy as “nouveau riche,
a recent immigrant who bought his way into Harvard” while
lauding Nixon as the “Abe Lincoln of California.”

What about the Romney crack? In real life, George Romney
was a very smart and quite liberal Republican in the Rockefeller
mode, and he began the 1968 campaign with a fair shot at winning
the party’s presidential nomination. In some polls he even held
the lead. But his campaign was so inexplicably horrendous that
it became a textbook example of how not to run from ahead.

More to the point, critics of the “clown” line are missing
the forest for the trees. The controversial remark is made by a
Republican political operative named Henry Francis, who at the
time is working for New York Mayor John Lindsay, who also had an
eye on the White House. Francis is far and away the most mature
and thoughtful of the male characters on “Mad Men” -- indeed,
even considering the many well-drawn female characters, it is
possible that Francis is the only real adult in the bunch: solid
father and husband, the one who says the most patient and
sensible things. His ideological sentiments are presented
without any hint of irony or hypocrisy.

In one episode, visiting a divorce attorney with the woman
he loves, Francis bristles at the lawyer’s suggestion that the
couple has a sexual relationship (they do not). Later, when his
now-wife fires their black maid for no good reason, Francis
greets this decision with the fury it deserves.

Conservative Cheer

There is always the risk that the writers will decide to
blow him up at some point. But it seems to me that the very
existence of Francis’s character is a reason for conservatives
to cheer, given the usual presentation of their side of the
argument on the small screen.

The burgeoning 1960s counterculture, by contrast, is
presented as slightly idiotic, a clutch of narcissists who seem
to think that getting high is an act of rebellion. There is no
system to rebel against, Draper tells a roomful of hippies in
one episode, and nobody can come up with a riposte.

The show has now reached the year 1966, but the revolution
is mysteriously absent. The campus ideologues who dined out on
Marcuse and Fanon never appear. The show’s rebels instead create
amusingly bad independent films, mutter ineffectually about
racial segregation, and read, of all things, the relentlessly
inward-looking poetry of Frank O’Hara. (There was also a single
blinkingly fast reference to the Berkeley free-speech protests.)

Why the writers have chosen to render their liberal
characters as vapid and clueless is a mystery, especially when
the show is set in an era when liberalism was triumphant.
Nevertheless, one of the most refreshing aspects of “Mad Men” is
the absence of the political preaching that makes so much prime-
time television unwatchable.

When copywriter Peggy Olson asks why the firm is doing
business with a company that refuses to hire black people, for
example, Draper replies in exasperation that their job is to
make people like the client’s products, not to make the client
“like Negroes.” The writers resist the temptation to give Peggy
a sharp retort: The issue simply fades, as at the time it
probably would have.

Some of the characters display a glimmer of progressive
consciousness. But the illumination is a dim, intermittent
flicker. Women are routinely mistreated on “Mad Men” although,
in response, occasional minor blows are struck for feminism.
(Feminist fans are fond of pointing out that the suburban-
housewife lifestyle lived by many of the female characters is
precisely what inspired Betty Friedan to write “The Feminine
Mystique,” but the book, published in 1963, has yet to make an
appearance.)

Clunky and Forced

The black community remains invisible, and efforts to
render “the Negroes” of the era visible in any serious way
invariably feel clunky and forced -- they are among the least
effective moments in the show. (For purist fans, yes, I do
include what has so far unfolded in the current season.)

Still, between the bloggers who follow every twist and turn
of the plot and the media-studies professors who write learned
articles, there is energy aplenty aimed at unpacking the show’s
politics. The more intriguing phenomenon is that a program that
rarely draws 3 million viewers should have become so culturally
iconic so swiftly that so many in the partisan wars should care
so intensely what its politics are.

In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, the
literary critic David Mendelsohn sharply criticizes “Mad Men” as
poorly scripted and badly acted. I disagree, though I could do
with a little less soap opera, and a little more attention to
the details of the creative end of advertising that gave such
verve to the first three seasons. But the less-remarked part of
the essay is that even Mendelsohn, despite trying hard to be
harsh, concedes the show’s allure, and points to the likely
source: Baby boomers were children and adolescents in the 1960s,
and are now trying to understand the world that shaped our
parents.

Perhaps Mendelsohn is half right. “Mad Men” has one of the
most financially desirable demographics of any program on cable
television. These are not people who will stick with a show that
offends their politics. Perhaps those of us who love “Mad Men”
are indeed Mendelsohn’s naive innocents, searching for an
explanation of how we got here.

Fine. Surely those whose interests are principally partisan
can find some other show to fight over, and let the rest of us
have our cathartic fun.

(Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a
professor of law at Yale University. He is the author of “The
Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama,” and his
next novel, “The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln,” will be
published in July. The opinions expressed are his own.)